


enter college student, crying

by crowkag



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: College Student Peter Parker, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, Peter Parker Needs a Break, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Suicidal Thoughts, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, we all write the tony stark we think we need
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:40:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26662333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowkag/pseuds/crowkag
Summary: This didn’t have to be a thing, right? He didn’t have to say anything. It was his problem, anyways. His responsibility, and it didn’t matter. It was abad semester. He was allowed to have those. He was human. Not hopeless, not a failure, not a disappointment…Shit.That was the wrong word.Disappointment.
Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 14
Kudos: 129





	enter college student, crying

**Author's Note:**

> hi! these were originally two sections of a longer fic, but i liked both of them enough on their own to just... separate them, & loosely fit them together with the similar enough theme of "college is hard, peter suffers, and thank god tony is there."
> 
> also, school sucks and i barely have the brain capacity to write anything substantial.
> 
> warnings for a panic attack in the first part (home), as well as very brief suicidal thoughts. the second part (campus) also features casual referencing to suicidal thoughts. the comfort kinda goes hand in hand with the hurt, rather than softening it completely.
> 
> read the tags & stay safe!

i. _home_

Mindful of his screen and careful not to slam it, Peter closed his laptop. His fingers twitched.

_Okay, Parker. You were stressed. It was a bad semester. Everybody has those._

Tony was across the room, setting the table for dinner. Peter focused on the clink of silverware from where he sat on a bar stool, his side leaning heavily against the granite countertop of the kitchen island. The webpage he’d been staring at—his records, his fucking academic records, those would _reflect in his GPA_ —flickered in his mind’s eye, like a stuttering projector screen.

This didn’t have to be a thing, right? He didn’t have to say anything. It was his problem, anyways. His responsibility, and it didn’t matter. It was a _bad semester_. He was allowed to have those. He was human. Not hopeless, not a failure, not a disappointment…

Shit.

That was the wrong word.

Disappointment.

Peter drew in a sharp breath. There was a sting lancing down his arms. He felt lightheaded.

_Fuck, not now. Please. Come on, Pete. Come on. It’s not… not an issue. It’s not, it’s just… it was just… Fuck. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuck—_

“Tony?”

Tony turned, immediately making his way over when he saw Peter’s face, worry etched into the lines around his eyes. He settled down on the next stool over, moving so that they faced each other, and Peter squeezed his eyes tight, feeling the panic start to close his throat up.

“What’s wrong, buddy?”

“I can’t… I can’t breathe, Tony.”

“Okay. Alright, Pete. I’m right here. You okay to be held right now?”

Peter violently shook his head.

“Alright, no touching. I’m still here, yeah. Right here, not leaving.”

Tony’s voice was soft but strong, in all the ways Peter couldn’t be right now. He jerked his chin in a stiff nod, feeling incredibly stupid, and shot his hands down to make a white-knuckle death grip on the stool edge between his knees.

“You know what to do, yeah?” Tony said. “Focus on my breathing, bud, just like always. I’m the loudest thing in this room.”

Peter’s mind flashed between impossibly empty, frustratingly full, and a strange mix of both at once. When something coherent formed, it was the same thoughts twisting around, over and over. _It’s hard. It’s hard, it hurts. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t fucking breathe. Please, Tony. I can’t breathe._

He tried listening, focusing. He swore the sounds of Tony’s breathing were there, so close, but there was a waterfall roaring in his ears and it fucking _sucked_. Any slightly longer breath was accompanied by more jittery, incomplete ones. His heart wanted to explode and his bones wanted to shatter, and he was such a fucking _failure_ , he just wanted to _die._

Then Tony’s voice came through again.

“Peter, I know it’s scary. I know. But I need you to try. Please.” And there was a lot of concern leaking from the softness, and a choked-up hurt lurking under the strength. Peter wanted to reach for his hand. Instead, he flashed one foot out, hooking a heel behind Tony’s. The man pressed his ankle back, muscle stiffened, every effort being made to tell Peter he was _there_.

It took what felt like twenty lifetimes to get the air back in his lungs. His chest ached in a new way, muscles raw, and the way his heart suddenly picked up a different tempo—deeper and stronger to get the oxygen circulating—left Peter a little dizzy. He felt tired in his bones, from his forehead to his toes.

When he slowly opened his eyes and looked up, Tony was giving him a small smile.

“There you go, bud.”

Peter tried to manage something back. A smile of his own, maybe. A nod. A thank you.

Instead, he said, “I got my grades back,” and it felt like shoving molasses through the gaps between his teeth.

Tony’s face twinged in sympathy.

“Didn’t like what you saw, I take it?”

Peter shook his head.

“I did… I did so _bad_. I got a…” He trailed off and a ragged breath came up his throat, something between a sigh and an empty sob. He leant forward, head thumping Tony’s shoulder with an almost boneless quality.

Tony brought his arms up, one hand squeezing the back of Peter’s neck, the other rubbing a line up and down Peter’s spine. Peter swallowed, and sniffled.

“My highest grade was a C. I got an… I got an _F_ , Tony. I _failed_ , I… I fucked up. I fucked it up. _God_.”

He expected Tony to stop him, to shush him and immediately make attempts at lightening the mood. But the man just tilted his head until his cheek rested on Peter’s curls. The hand Peter felt against the back of his neck moved, an arm wrapping around his shoulders and tugging him closer. Tony kept up that hypnotizing line along the ridges of his spine.

Peter shuddered on an exhale. He wasn’t entirely certain whether he was crying or not, but he wouldn’t be surprised if he were. An entire semester load of tears, drowning clothing fabric and flooding penthouse kitchens.

“I don’t know, I don’t—I don’t know why. I don’t know why I didn’t try. I just couldn’t, I couldn’t, I tried to try and I couldn’t do it, Tony. I’m so sorry, I’m sorry. I’m so stupid, I’m sorry.”

His arms came up then, trembling, to tug lightly at the back of Tony’s sweatshirt.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, like a litany. A chant. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Tony just held him, beginning to rock back and forth.

He kept himself quiet.

As quiet as Peter needed.

ii. _campus_

It was cold and wet as Peter stormed across the quad. He was having difficulty deciding if the coldness and wetness was from the weather, or the iced coffee seeping down the front of his clothes.

Probably both.

Dammit, he’d spent six dollars on that fucking cappuccino, and what little had touched his lips hadn’t even tasted that great. Less than two hours into this day and it was already a bad one.

Just his Parker Fucking Luck. People were _definitely_ staring at him, too.

Whatever.

Whatever, whatever.

He’d get a quick shower, just enough to scrub the caffeinated stickiness from his skin. Throw on some new clothes, make a play at forgetting this had ever happened, and haul ass across campus in time for—

“Yeesh, Pete. You know you’re supposed to _drink_ the coffee, right?”

Peter stopped short, dead in his fucking tracks, and looked up from his scuffed sneakers because wait, how the hell—

“Tony? What are you doing here?”

The man was in a pair of faded jeans and a light jacket, leant against one of the lamps on the edge of the quad’s walkway. He pushed off the pole and gestured around as Peter came closer.

“Oh, just listening to the idle college chatter. Everyone keeps whispering about this Tony Stark guy who showed up on campus, not sure what that’s about. Hi, by the way.”

Peter blinked a few times, one two three four, in rapid succession. Tony raised a brow, leaning forward expectantly.

“This would be the part where you say hi back, Peter,” he stage-whispered.

Wind coming over the dormitory roofs caught the familiar scent of motor oil and aftershave and the lavender shampoo Tony always stole from Pepper, and wow, okay. This was real.

“I need to change my clothes,” Peter said by way of a response, and Tony definitely noticed the lump he was speaking around because a gentle smile was curving along the man’s mouth.

“I’ll say. You smell like a Starbucks threw up on you, kiddo.”

Peter laughed, and resisted the urge to burst into tears of relief on the spot.  
  


****  
  


Twenty minutes later, freshly washed and wearing a clean set of clothes, Peter practically launched himself into Tony’s open arms where he sat on the edge of his bed.

The last time anybody beside himself had been standing in this cramped single was a little over two months ago during move-in. His walls read _lonely_ and the floor spelled out _breakdown_ , but the font size felt smaller compared to the _safety_ of scratchy facial hair, or the _love_ etched into a slightly off-tempo heartbeat.

Peter sighed, contentment overriding exhaustion, with his head turned against Tony’s collarbone. A calloused thumb was running small circles on the nape of his neck.

“You okay, bud?” Tony asked, voice gone all warm and soft now that they weren’t being stared down by slack-jawed undergraduates.

Peter inwardly shrugged.

_Eh, not really. I thought about killing myself a few nights ago and I’m pretty sure that’s not normal, and that I’m not okay, and that I’m a fucking wreck who’s letting everyone down. This is hard, Tony, super hard. Someone turned the difficulty setting up and I can’t do this. Please take me home whenever you leave. Or just stay here, I’m sick of being alone like this and—_

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just homesick. I miss you guys.”

Tony pressed a kiss to his forehead.

“And you know we miss you. Morgan won’t stop asking when you’re coming to visit.” He tapped an index finger behind the shell of Peter’s ear. “Don’t tell her I was here, by the way. It’s safe to say she’ll kill me if she knows I wasn’t actually on a city trip.”

“Wow, are you asking me to lie about you lying to her?”

Tony flicked his shoulder.

“Hey, I deserve some quality Underoos time too, ya know. Besides, even if I let her play hooky, today was show-and-tell day. I’m pretty sure it’s a crime against the universe to skip show-and-tell day.”

Peter laughed.

“Whatever you say.”

“I’ll have you know this was a plan sanctioned by Pepper _and_ May, Pete.”

“Wow. Tell me Rhodey encouraged this, too, so I can say _four_ adults in my life were promoting lying.”

“Ya know, your door is conveniently close. It would be really easy to walk out of it.”

“Be my guest.”

They both stayed exactly where they were.

“Thank you,” Peter murmured. “For driving, like, ten billion hours to come see me.”

Tony smiled into his hair at the exaggeration.

“As if I haven’t driven a whole lot longer for you before, kiddo.”  
  


****  
  


Staring at the ceiling later on that night, Tony’s words played on a loop in Peter’s mind. The sun had been dipping low behind the trees when he’d left, eyes glittering sadly as they’d come up to his car.

_It’s the home stretch, buddy_ , he’d said, chucking a curled finger under Peter’s chin to make sure he looked at him. _Just stay focused, hunker down, and you’ll be done before you know it._

Peter took slow breaths, rubbing his palms flat on his bedspread.

This semester had been shitty so far… but who was to say he couldn’t turn it around?

_Stay focused… hunker down…_

He went to sleep with something like hope in his chest.

**Author's Note:**

> college is really hard. thank god i have my personal projection punching bag named peter parker to get me through it.
> 
> (i'm sorry peter bby)
> 
> thank yall for reading. kudos & comments soothe my soul :)
> 
> <3000


End file.
